Blu-ray for G33 chipset motherboards under XP

I've just finished getting Blu-ray playback working on my Intel G33 chipset based motherboard running under Windows XP (SP3). I initially thought this would be a slam dunk - add blu-ray drive, install PowerDVD, slam in a Blu-ray disk and off we go. I knew I wasn't going to be getting digital high def audio (24 bit/192khz) from my system - this much I uncovered while investigating HTPC for a friend. That prompted him to go off an buy a blu-ray player instead of the HTPC route - even though he didn't even have HDMI audio on his high end Cambridge Audio amp.

Anyway during investigation I found that for about $150 I could get a Pioneer BDC-202 blu-ray drive offering 4X read-ony blu-ray plus standard DVD/CD read/write. That was below my previous $200 threshold where upgrading to blu-ray seemed to be "no-brainer". So off I went and ordered one from Newegg along with a copy of Blade Runner "The Final Cut" a five disk blu-ray extravaganza. I also stuck the first disk of "Planet Earth" on our NetFlix queue. Well that was the easy bit...

So when the drive arrives I install it with not much ado, and happily remove the last clunky IDE cable from my motherboard (the new drive is SATA 2.0) and disabling IDE support in the BIOS as I go. Then I go to download the Cyberlink PowerDVD trial but as I'm reading on the download page I notice it says under a section called "Not supported" G33 video playback. But my Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard is based on the Intel G33 chipset which is supposed to support HDCP HDMI output, MPEG2 acceleration and even has a Realtek ALC-889A D/A chip with a protected audio path (PAP) that Cyberlink were about to add support for (to give analog conversion of the high-def audio streams). I download their handy app that tells you if your system is blu-ray ready and sure enough it is flagging my graphics drivers as not blu-ray ready.

Further investigation on AVS Forum leads me to conclude that I'm pretty much screwed unless I upgrade to Windows Vista or get a discret video card. For some reason the HDCP support in my video drivers is noew good enough for NetFlix video HDCP playback but Intel pretty much refuses to bring out G33 drivers that support blu-ray under Windows XP. Grrr.

So I start looking at Vista which I've staunchly avoided for a couple of years now because I just didn't need it and all my other systems are XP and they didn't need it. Eventually I really don't want to install Vista just to get blu-ray.

So then I look at video cards which doesn't make me happy because when I bought my system I deliberate picked one with integrated graphics so I wouldn't need discreet video. I don't do gaming on it and I don't need the extra 30W or so of power consumption even when the system is idle - let alone all the heat and noise when its not. But the good news is there are some fanless sub-$50 video cards, something like an nVidia 8400 or 8600 based card which will give full high-def video acceleration and come with nvidia drivers that support HDCP/blu-ray. At that price I figure I can get it, wait out Intel for G33 drivers or whatever happens next (maybe I upgrade to G45 or the next round of Nehalem or post Nehalem motherboards after that).

As I explore the AVS Forum a bit more I start to see people say that PowerDVD just doesn't do blu-ray under XP period. Then I see people saying it does, or that if you use ArcSoft Total Media Theater (TMT) you can have blu-ray under XP - its not an XP limitation. So just for giggles and kicks I download TMT and try it out but bizarrely it doesn't even read the Planet Earth disk, its as if it isn't there. I start to wonder if the drive is fried but find that it works fine with DVD or CD. So I start to wonder if its a firmware issue and upgrade the Pioneer drive to the latest 1.07 firmware - still no change. Then I experiment with all kinds of BIOS settings, moving the drive to a different SATA port, turning on IDE emulation mode etc. etc. Still no joy - put blu-ray disk in and it just doesn't show up. Some people on AVS Forum suggest that maybe the disk is dead - it does look a little strange so I resolve to wait for my Blade Runner disks to show up.

Blade Runner shows up and I stick one of the disks in and low and behold TMT fires up and starts playing the disk. Yay I think and promptly declare the system working without stopping to think how practically impossible it is that the system really is playing a blu-ray disk. Nonetheless I plonk in the Planet Earth disk in the drive and it doesn't play, just like before, so I happily declare it a bad disk, put it back into its NetFlix envelope and send it on its way.

Well it didn't take me long to try another disk from the Blade Runner pack and hmmm, seems to be a problem - it isn't playing. I switch to the other disk - fine. Then it dawns on me - the disk that plays is actually a DVD - two of the disks in the five pack are actually DVDs, not blu-ray. Doh! So realizing I've probably just put a perfectly good disk back in the mail to NetFlix I get back on the case of the unplayable disk.

Some more posts on AVS Forum lead me to the conclusion that even if the graphics drivers are bad, even if the player software doesn't like my system the files on the blu-ray disk should show up on the filesystem but that is not what I'm seeing, I'm seeing nothing, I mean nuttin! I boot up my system under Linux and see the same problem - DVD good, Blu-ray bad. But under Linux I'm able to peruse the system log and get some error information that the file system on the blu-ray disk is not supported. After reading more Linx posts (Linux posts - for a Windows problem???) I discover that blu-ray uses UDF 2.5 file system and this is only supported under Windows Vista, not Windows XP - strike #2 against XP I guess. Funny how nothing that came with my shing new Pioneer drive mentioned this...

I wonder if there are drivers for UDF 2.5 that work with XP and eventually find out from the Digital Digest website that there are drivers out there on the grey market of downloads from obscure places. They were ripped from the Xbox 360 software that supported HD-DVD which also required UDF 2.5 support. Somewhat sceptically I download the files, unpack them and install - after rebooting my system (essential) I stick a drive in and go explore the drive. Lo and behold it worked, I can now see files on the drive even with blu-ray.

I fire up TMT again and it starts doing something - I hear audio but get a black screen where the video should be. I then install WinDVD but that doesn't work at all (in fact it doesn't even install barfing at the point it needs to load some C runtime libraries). I go back to trying PowerDVD (this is the third reinstall of that software) but on trying to play the disk it just tells me my hardware is incompatible and stops. Back to square one, well maybe square one and a half - at least I now know my drive is just fine and almost certainly the Planet Earth disk was not faulty at all.

So I post again on AVS Forum (about my tenth post on the subject by this time) and quite by chance someone says it sounds like all I need now are "Japanese beta video drivers" for TMT. Huh? No more information than that but its enough to get going so after many forum searches and Google searches I finally find a thread that mentions yes there is some beta version of TMT from 2007 that apparently worked with the G33 chipset and its GMA 3100 graphics processor. More searching leads me another AVS Forum post that has a link to a download that contains two magical driver files which I duely copy into the appropriate TMT program directory. One more reboot, fire up TMT, fingers crossed and boom - Houston we have blu-ray! Glorious high def Blade Runner playing right there on my XP machine with the supposedly unsupported chipset.

So yes, it can be done but it took me virtually a whole day of trial and error - install, uninstall, reboot, search, re-search, tearing out of hair. swearing, pounding of keyboard, and frustration. So now I have this whacky Frankenstein blu-ray system with unsupported drivers from an xbox-360 and Japanese beta graphics drivers - but it works with no Vista and no extra video card.

I have a feeling that anyone with a G35 based system with XP can probably use the same combination of hacks, just follow the links above. Hopefully G45 users will find things a lot easier since Intel is supposed to be supporting HDCP blu-ray even for XP, and maybe eventually they will go back and fix their G33 and G35 drivers - now other have shown them it is possible (apparently). My two remaining questions are:

1) Why the heck don't all blu-ray drive manufacturers provide drivers for UDF 2.5 under XP just like USB devices come with drivers for pre-XP versions of Windows. And why the heck hasn't Microsoft produced official drivers for download?

2) If I buy the official TMT product will it work without driver hacks? Or will it perhaps break a some point with the drivers I have already? By all accounts a bunch of people are also using these Japanese drivers so ArcSoft should really be sorting this problem out. I guess I'll find out when I purchase TMT since there are no other alternatives for G33/XP/blu-ray at the moment.